Finished Darksiders 2. Holy shit this game tested my patience.
I burnout on this one shortly after beating the arena boss in the undead realm, couldn't continue after.
I did get some enjoyment before reaching this point though.
The undead bosses were pretty good after that, imo.
Basileas and his pet spider were fun, and the Wailling Host is an impressive spectacle without too much bullshit. After that though it gets gradually more irritating, although the areas do get more and more visually impressive, and there's a level where you go to Earth and it becomes a third person shooter, mowing down demons and undead with an angelic machine gun and a demonic sticky nade laucher, which I thought was neat.
Samael was fine. There is a QTE mid boss fight, but if you fail it (and you will because the game commits the sin of "little to no mid cutscene QTEs except for when you aren't expecting it on a first playthrough because FUCK YOU!) it doesn't seem to punish you. I think you just lose the chance to deal extra damage to him or something.
Archon was ok up until his final phase where he just starts throwing all sorts of crap at you,
Jeremiah was a boring gimmick boss and fuck the final boss with the biggest scythe you could find.
Black stone looks cool, but its really short and the enemies are bullshit. Lostlight is also pretty and short with annoying enemies, but not as bullshit as the demon enemies.
After a while the flaws of the game really begin to wear it down. Why such a limited inventory space? Why no storage? Why are the platforming prompts so faulty and will send you to your death? Why is Death on the inventory screen so low res? Why are the collectible quests so goddamn long winded and tedious? Its not as if the campaign is short; normally when a dev throws in a collectible quest like that its to pad out a short campaign, but Darksiders 2 has a campaign of decent length as well as NG+, so such a "feature" is unnecessary.
The game doesn't even tell you what its own stats do. It doesn't tell you what Strength, Arcane, Penetration, any of the elemental effects or any of the special abilities do in detail. If I have to go to the forums to find see what effect they are supposed to have, you did a shit job. Even Dark Souls does a better job it. They at least have a help function that gives you an idea of what stat does. Sure, its unclear in some cases and it doesn't tell you how scaling works, but at least From made a bloody effort, and at least you have more than nothing.
I don't know if I'm just doing it wrong, but I found the combat to get repetitive after a while. The only combo that seems to work reliably is 3 scyth attacks followed by 2 heavies followed followed by a scythe. If I try to do air combos or any of the combos with a delay the game just refuses to do it.
In training I could get it to work, but in combat the game just shits itself and my character does what he wants. If you were looking for not-DMC, you came to the wrong place. Speaking of doing what the character wants, I've noticed that sometimes the game gets stuck using strong heavy attacks or gear attacks. This nearly got me killed against Absolom (whatever the fuck his name is. Big boring goo-man final boss), as I had claws which charged me forward constantly into his attacks. Fortunately, I managed to summon some ghouls to finish him off while Death was having his seizure.
There is a similar issue with dodging. You know how in Dark Souls if you dodge to the side you dodge to the side? Well in Darksiders 2 the dodge direction seems to change relative to your position, which means a dodge that's meant to go to the side ends up going towards an enemy, who will always happen to be winding up a attack. Why? Why not do what Dark Souls do and have it relative to the target's position? If I dodge to the side, it should be to the enemy's side, not whatever direction the game thinks side is.
Target switch sucks. Doesn't bloody work, or does whatever the hell it wants. "Doing whatever it wants" seems to be a common theme with Darksiders 2, really.
Oh, and if you take screenshots too quickly the game's video freezes. If you do wait long enough between screenshots though, sometimes the game will cut the signal to the video card, resulting in a black screen until you alt-tab out of it. Either this is a new steam bug, but its a problem with the game. Considering how many screenshots I took of Shadowrun Hong Kong, which I played just before Darksiders 2, I'm going with the latter.
Its as if the game doesn't want you to play it. If a game were a person, it would be the asshole clerk who does a half-arsed job or short changes you because you didn't say his convoluted name right or some petty crap like that.
There was no...love, I guess, in this game. You could tell that the devs teams behind Shadowrun Hong Kong and Sudeki (last two games I completed) enjoyed making them, or at least respected their work and medium. Sure, there were problems, and I bitched about those problems, but at least they tried to make something decent with what they had and made an good product.
With the PC port Darksiders 2 Deathifinitive edition as if they just didn't give a fuck, and it shows.
I mean, the PC port of Sudeki is better designed, and that game was from 2005.
